Every one of these people is changing the world
The beautiful Catalan city of Barcelona has been swarming with Open Ed activists, hackers, teachers, learners and free culture punks for the last few weeks, and P2PU has been in the thick of it. And despite a few setbacks (stomach flu, colds and Barcelona’s famous pickpockets) the 2010 Workshop was a resounding success.
As a community that exists primarily in cyberspace, P2Pu feels very strongly that it’s important to meet at least once a year to talk about important issues that affect us all, and this year was no different. While the 2009 meeting carved out a plan for a fledgling new project, the 2010 meeting was all about meeting the challenges that face a growing and vibrant community, who are, slowly but surely, making headway into changing the face of Open Education. How to govern our growing community, building the best possible platform, encouraging research and building a truly multi-lingual community were just some of the ideas we discussed.
As always, the principles of rough consensus and total openness in all decision guided all the proceedings. To this end, every session was documented on the wiki, so that community member who were unable to join us could follow along.
One of the most significant outcomes of the workshop was the establishment of working groups for just about ever aspect of P2PU activities. Each group, (which deal with topics like new courses, research, the School of Webcraft, technology, review, translation and Schools in general) has a mailing list, a contact person, and a mandate fro the community to work in these areas to action the decisions that are taken by the group. To say we’re excited about these would be an understatement!
To find out more, and join any of these groups, please take a look at the information page on the wiki.
We decided to run our second planning workshop in Barcelona to coincide with the Mozilla Drumbeat and Open Education meetings, as well as hoping to take in the very best Catalan food, drink and sunshine. And of course, no P2PU gathering would be complete without at least a few night’s worth of staying out late and making our presence felt. Many thanks to all the bars and restaurants who put up with us!
Many other people have covered the workshop: check out Janeybones’ fantastic photo essay and the awesome P2Pu Flickr pool.
Also, have a look at the P2PU Planet to see what community members’ take on the workshop was.
We’re already thinking about next year. We’re not 100% sure where it will be yet, but we know it’s going to be special!